Chef Martin Picard' at his Cabane à sucre Au Pied de Cochon in St. Benoît de Mirabel, QC on Thursday March 1, 2012. Picard was launching his new cookbook Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack.Pierre Obendrauf / THE GAZETTE

Martin Picard at his Cabane à sucre Au Pied de Cochon in St. Benoît de Mirabel, QC on Thursday March 1, 2012. Picard was launching his new cookbook Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack.Pierre Obendrauf / THE GAZETTE

The Daiquiri à l'Èrable at Martin Picard's Cabane à sucre Au Pied de Cochon in St. Benoît de Mirabel, QC on Thursday March 1, 2012. Picard was launching his new cookbook Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack.Pierre Obendrauf / THE GAZETTE

Pastry chef Gabrielle Rivard-Hiller with some of her cookies at Martin Picard's Cabane à sucre Au Pied de Cochon in St. Benoît de Mirabel, QC on Thursday March 01, 2012. Picard was launching his new cookbook Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack.Pierre Obendrauf / THE GAZETTE

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MONTREAL - When it comes to Montreal chef Martin Picard, there are a few words that would never come to mind: conservative, mild-mannered, predictable, vegetarian. No, Picard has made his name by being Quebec’s wild chef, a man with unbridled culinary imagination, an appetite for fat-rimmed pork products and a no-holds-barred lust for excess. Be it by serving highbrow foie gras on lowbrow poutine or presenting a pig’s head to diners with the snout sheathed in gold leaf, political correctness is not part of his vocabulary. Judging by his latest book, Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack, the wild chef is still at the peak of his creative powers. By placing the focus this time on a product, maple syrup, Picard has lifted this signature Quebec ingredient from the breakfast table to the realm of haute cuisine. And by exploring syrup’s sensual side, he’s not only made maple delicious, but downright sexy.

Picard was already lauded on the local scene when his first cookbook, Au Pied de Cochon, The Album, was published – self-published – in 2006. But when the book hit the top of many a chef’s wish list, his fame went viral. At a time when cookbooks were epitomized by star-chefs’ books laden with nitpicky recipes, Picard’s album broke the white-bread mold. Chock full of original dishes (many of which were based on little-known Québécois classics), the book also featured pictures of this lumberjack shirt-wearing rebel with pig producers, skinning a deer, and even wearing a purple toga while drinking a bottle of beer and holding two dead chickens. Save for the definite sense of humour behind it all, it verged on being the Caligula of cookbooks.

Between braised lamb shanks and monster lobsters, Page 131 of the book began a chapter focused on Picard’s future. Not his signature ingredient foie gras, but maple syrup, or more specifically the tradition of the French Canadian cabane à sucre. In that chapter, Picard confesses: “One of my secret ambitions is to run a sugar shack. I have always dreamed of acquiring a small sugar bush where I could tap between 1,000 and 1,500 maple trees and set up an experimental kitchen and bakery. Once it’s stripped down of its folksy, down-home allure, the possibilities are endless.”

In 2009, Picard’s sugar-shack dream was realized. Located in St. Benoît de Mirabel, the Au Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre was a 106-seat shack open only for 10 weeks a year. What fun it was to see a creative thinker let loose on the traditional cabane-à-sucre menu. There was the classic tourtière and pea soup, but also ducks braised in maple syrup, lobster maki rolls and maple baked Alaska. The ambience was electric, and the fine wines flowed. And this was a family affair as I recall seeing Picard’s beautiful children Emile and Charlotte carrying in buckets of sap to his uncle, Marc “Mon oncle” Picard, who is in charge of all maple-syrup production.

So, of course, the next logical step was a cookbook. Yet the resulting 382-page tome (compared to the Album’s 289) is so much more than a cookbook.

Picard sees this book as vastly different than the last. Though as eccentric as the first, with its inclusion of short stories and extremely sensual photographs of women in various states of undress, the core of the cookbook includes detailed descriptions of both the maple syrup-making process and a diary of a week in the life of the Cabane at the height of the maple tapping season. And yet this is most definitely a cookbook, with a plethora of original recipes calling for arguably Quebec’s most famous ingredient.

Cooking with maple syrup provided Picard some unexpected challenges.

“I bought this place to force myself to use this product,” says the chef, sitting on a fur-lined stool in the cabane’s kitchen. “It’s bizarre that there weren’t many cooking references, recipes or books to get us going, so when we began, we just brainstormed about what we wanted to do with maple. Working with maple is like learning a language. When you learn to speak French or English, you have to think in that language, dream in that language. It has to become part of your thinking process. The same goes for cooking with maple syrup. You can’t just think of it in recipes as a replacement for white sugar.”

When collaborating with sous-chef Vincent Dion Lavallée to create savoury recipes, Picard found it difficult because “the flavour is too subtle to stand out in a dish. In savoury dishes, it can only enhance. With desserts, you really get the maple flavour. Milk and cream are great conductors for maple.”

Though many of the recipes look complicated, Dion Lavallée suggests eliminating a few homemade ingredients like bread or smoked meat to simplify the task. And Picard wants people to cook from this book.

“There are more technique photos in this time. It’s more encyclopedic. In this book, the comical side is less prevalent. It wasn’t easy to do these recipes, but – ‘tabarnouche’ – I stuck to it. Everything had to be perfect. Whenever I do something I do it well.”

However, there may be a few recipes here even the most ambitious home cooks might prefer to avoid. Let’s just say the squirrel sushi and confederation beaver will not be on my to-do list any time soon. I give huge points for Picard for transforming these destructive rodents into dishes worthy of an outlandish sushi bar (the squirrel) or haute French restaurant (the beaver), though he doesn’t even consider these recipes odd.

“I did everything not to shock this time around,” he says with a bit of a shrug. “The hunting chapter (titled The Feather and the Furry) is at the end of the book. And it wasn’t designed to provoke anything. I just like to cook animals.”

And there’s a reason to cook some of these animals, too: survival.

“Squirrels are all over the place here,” Picard says. “But squirrels also eat all the pipes and tubing in the forest used to pipe in the sap. It’s terrible. They’re a nuisance, just a f---ing rat with a fur coat on. But it’s also great meat.”

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